Change Your Brain Every Day - One Man’s Search for the Existence of God with Rice Broocks

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

When “God’s Not Dead” author Rice Broocks noticed a rise in atheism in the post 9/11 landscape, he was determined to find out what was causing people to abandon their faith. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Broocks joins Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen for a discussion on his surprising discoveries of faith and existence.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Well, we have a very special guest and a very special week. Uh, and we decided to call this Where is God Week. Now, it's obviously no surprise that Tana and I are devout Christians, and we've talked about that before. And I helped to create the Daniel Plan.

And we've had really some amazing guests, but we have Pastor Dr. Rice Brooks with us, who is the author of God's Not Dead, which then turned into a blockbuster movie, which we saw, which was amazing. He is the pastor at Bethel Church in Nashville. And Every Nation, he's also creator of Every Nation. Well, he's one of the co-founders. One of the co-founders, which has churches in 80 countries, you said? About that, yeah. Wow. But your first love was actually working with young people. Well, I'm still the world's oldest living teenager, so I'm out on campus.

I'm out primarily on campus, which is a lot of what we do in our church movement is we plant churches that target campus communities. So two weeks ago, I was in Poland right there near the, last week, Indiana University. So I'm taking this message in a multimedia fashion to the campuses, and then from there, good things happen. Well, that makes sense because the movie sort of was fashioned around that, and that makes sense. And you have to take care of your brain because if you're on that many planes, there's a whole bunch of toxins going along with them. That's why I'm here. We are going to teach you how to detoxify your brain.

Because if you have a big mission, then most people don't really ever think about their brain. I read that in one of your books. You talked about the danger of airplane flight. I thought I've been almost 3 million miles in a plane. I have passed that. That is already whatever you can do to unravel 3 million miles of air travel. We are definitely going to do it because God created your brain to heal. There's this whole thing called neuroplasticity that if you put your brain in a healing environment, it can be a whole bunch better.

So that is our goal. So in addition to the author of God's Not Dead, Man, Myth, Messiah, the evidence behind God's Not Dead 2, which we saw in Love, and the human right to know Jesus Christ and to make him known. That was connected to the third one.

So you'll just keep going. Is there another one coming up? Why did you get? It already happened, and it's going to be like Fast and Furious or Rock. Right, because there's another one. It will just keep going. It's already happened. So we are going to talk about where is God?

Because this is like a seriously crazy time. Although I'm always reminded, whenever I say that, I remember when I was six years old and I was in Catholic school. We had 48 students in a class, right? Six rows, eight deep. And we had nuclear war drills, right? It's like get under your desk. So the part that feels scary to me, though, is how we're turning on each other. If the sirens go off, it's like get under your desk. The part that feels scary to me, though, is how we're turning on each other.

It feels unsafe to me now because the hatred amongst us as a country where we used to have similar values, and even though there were differences, there was some level of respect. There's none now. So before we get into that, just so I want the listeners to, I want them to really know Pastor Brooke's heart. Why did you write God's Not Dead? Okay, great question. And I'll try to make it short. Well, my story is not very exciting in terms of how I came to faith. I was just a guy that needed God. But my atheist brother was in law school at SMU in Dallas, and he came home to talk me out of my faith one weekend.

So he started studying the Bible to find the contradictions. So the weekend that he came home to talk me out of my faith, we baptized him. Oh, wow. And when he came up out of the water, he said, you haven't really answered all my questions, but I think I've been asking the wrong questions. So what I did was I pulled a thread that kind of unraveled his worldview. Many times people have all these questions for God, but maybe he has one for you. So my entire family, my dad was in the oil business after my, my dad kind of figured that I needed some kind of help. So if it's God, great. But when my brother came to faith, that was earth shaking. My entire family came to

faith, my dad at 57. And so, in fact, my dad said, I prayed for a miracle all my life and I never thought I'd see one, but I think he's shown me one. God has shown it to me in the form of my two sons. And he said, I don't know much about God, but I got down on my knees, he told my mom, and asked Jesus Christ to forgive me for my pride and my arrogance. So my family was a revolution. So from there, I graduated with, I was an accounting major. I went to see that same miracle happen with other kids, other students. So I started traveling the campuses of the world. Anyway, cut to the movie. Basically, right around the mid, right after 9-11, this ties into the Where's God? Because right after 9-11, there was a rise

of what was called the New Atheism. You had men like Richard Dawkins, who's a biologist, Sam Harris, who's a neuroscientist out of LA out here, and then others that came along. Christopher Hitchens, a very eloquent atheist. He passed away a couple of years ago. But basically, they began to write books saying religion is the problem. So with that was this almost immediate reaction of as these books were written, then there was this massive fallout away from the faith. In fact, some studies said that seven out of ten young people will leave high school with a faith of some kind

when they get to the university, then they'll lose it. And the reason why is because they don't have anything beyond a subjective experience. They felt something in the youth group or whatever, but yet when they get into the atmosphere of arguments where there's, you know, it's not your subjective experience that's on the line, is do you have anything that's true? Is there any evidence? In writing this book, I went to the Global Atheist Convention,

which was in Melbourne, Australia, the largest indoor gathering of atheists in history. And the refrain was that basically faith is just blind. If you believe something, you pull the blinds down, you close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, And that's what, uh, that's how you come to your quote faith. So I started writing this book. I have some friends, uh, that are singing group called the news boys and they rolled up into my driveway one day. And, uh, the lead singer lived across the street, but the rolled up in the driveway and said, Hey, we've got this new song. And what

do you think? I said, let's, let's give them more than just a song. Let's give the reasons, let's give them evidence. And so then I was writing the book and I was literally driving down the road with a friend who's a businessman. I said, I'm writing this book. I told him why. And he said, that needs to be a movie.

So he brought the movie company to me. We came here to LA, they followed me around UCLA and we had conversations and met with the screenwriters, and we just kind of thought it would be a nice little movie, and it ended up, minimally what it did was it shattered records, and the Rotten Tomatoes didn't like it. Of course not. Beyond that, the box office liked it, and it's gone all over the world.

So that was way more than you asked for. It has 37,000 reviews on imdb yeah unbelievable yeah and uh it was a it was quite a shock to see the response thoughtful i actually loved the part toward the end where they talked about stephen hawking's um argument against god yeah and they actually buried him in Westminster Abbey. It shocked me. I'm like, Stephen Hawking's buried in Westminster Abbey, one of the most beautiful churches in the world.

You're going to end up in church regardless of your beliefs. Either way. I mean, all due respect to him. Obviously, he was none like him in terms of his intellect. Right. So I don't want to say anything negative about that. But yeah, Hawking, basically what Hawking said was, he said, because there's a law like gravity,

this was in his last book, the universe canon will create itself out of nothing. Well, wait a minute. That's a, I'll quote John Lennox, who's a mathematician from Oxford and a philosopher. He said, that's a contradiction. If there's nothing, then gravity is not nothing. So you either have an eternal law like gravity that's just self-existent that's nothing, then gravity is not nothing. So you either have an eternal law like gravity

that's just self-existent that's there, or you have an eternal lawgiver. Both the atheist and the theist has to posit something that didn't start. So when somebody says, who made God? Well, okay, fair question. But yet you either have a physical reason for the physical universe, or you have a non-physical reason. And the evidence is the universe had a beginning, that space, time, and matter had an absolute beginning 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang. So if space and time had a beginning, then the cause must necessarily be spaceless, timeless, obviously uncaused, powerful, and ultimately personal. Because to go from nothing, which is what rocks dream about, I mean, that's nothing, to something, then obviously that was volitional. There was a decision being made. So it's sad that a man could be so brilliant in terms

of breaking down the physical universe. But just because you know how an iPhone works doesn't mean Steve Jobs never existed. I mean, you just, when you're looking for God, I'm asking people, what evidence do you want? Well, they're looking for something physical. Well, God's not physical. The architect of this building is not in the walls. So what we're looking for is the evidence for an intelligent mind. But anyway, once you get to the fact that God exists, then you get into these questions that you're bringing up about, well, if he is there and the evidence shows he is, then why this?

So I'll go back to your initial theme of why. But I wanted people to get to know you and they are a little bit. When we come back, we're actually gonna attack this question, where is God? Stay with us. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com.

Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.